Now that the Senate has dismissed two messaging bills designed to give each party talking points in the battle over rising gas prices and oil industry profits, attention turns to whether the two sides can reach any serious compromise on either.

A Democratic plan to force the five biggest companies to pay billions more annually in taxes and a Republican bill aimed at boosting offshore oil and gas drilling fell well short this week to get the 60 votes needed on initial procedural votes.

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“They were designed that way,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). “It’s a shame because we could have fixed both of them.”

Whether and how that would happen is unclear.

“It’s hard to know where we go from here because unfortunately these bills are not being built from the center out but they’re being built from the wings of both parties,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who voted against both bills on the floor this week.

Landrieu said next week she will start contacting some of the “gang” of senators that put together a bipartisan energy plan back when gas prices spiked in 2008 “and see if we can initiate something from the center.”

The plan by that coalition of centrists — led by Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and whose membership doubled during its existence to around 20 senators in the end — went nowhere that year after gas prices started to plummet that fall after hitting a peak of $4.11 a gallon in July.

“But right now the pressure is still high,” Landrieu said. Prices aren't expected to dramatically dip back down this time around.

Conrad and Chambliss brought the gang back together for a quick initial gathering at the end of March, but both have been consumed by their roles on another gang of senators trying to reach an accord on a debt and deficit reduction plan.

That may mean new leadership may be in order.

“He has to stay focused” on the debt talks, Landrieu said of Conrad, who is chairman of the Budget Committee. “So maybe some of us will step up on the energy committee and I’ll talk with him about that.”

Manchin, like Landrieu, is considered a potential swing vote on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

His solution to fixing the Democratic bill repealing oil industry incentives is to include some line in the sand representing where companies would continue to receive incentives.

“There could have been a floor for the oil,” he said Wednesday.

Democrats have pointed both to recent high profits reported by the big oil companies as well as the price of crude oil — which briefly went back up over $100 a barrel Wednesday — as justifying their stance in getting rid of the incentives and putting the money toward the deficit.

Democratic leaders say they will continue to push their tax incentive repeal plan as part of high-stakes budget and debt limit talks.

“I don’t how know we get a deal on long-term debt and the budget without looking at tax expenditures,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said. “I can’t imagine that any serious attempt to look at tax expenditures should not include the tax expenditures for Big Oil.”

Republicans though say that idea is off the table and would kill the talks.

Democrats like Manchin could be the ones who reach out to Republicans and offer a chance to create some grand compromise involving both oil incentives and ramping up production.

“On production, I commiserate with them, basically the bureaucratic agencies and they’re approach or no approach basically of doing anything,” Manchin said.

Its crying wolf pure and simple. After while nobody is going to believe anything the child says.

There is no demand or supply problem, that's the crying wolf part. There is a major problem in the commodity exchange markets that's killing the economy. The wolf is in the henhouse at the moment and he is being allowed to eat what he wants. Until they redesign the commodity markets or regulate them in such a way that the investor riffraff is pushed out, no housing, jobs, or general recovery. The exchanges were created to try and bring more certainty to the industries that take delivery of the commodity. However now they are being inundated by traders who are there for a multitude of reasons to the harm of the world economies. Most of them don't take delivery.

I watched a "news" report on Fox today that went nuts over a man who won a $2 million lottery but yet still collected food stamps. Seems like a fair analogy for the oil companies making tens of billions each year but are still defending their $2 billion annual taxpayer subsidies. No mention is made that Exxon-Mobile and Chevron for starters paid no federal income tax last year or that the many billions comprising 45% of their profits were made overseas and were also kept untaxed out of the US.